Perpetual Ocean

As soon as the video from NASA hit the internet we were looking at a way to bring this data into Google Earth and allow interactive exploration of the oceans currents. Eventually a comment from Andrew Leahy on Google+ led to a collection of images.

72 jpeg images with a size of 2048 by 1024 pixels that look like this:

Rather than black land masses I wanted the original Google Earth imagery to show though and therefore all the black needed to be made transparent. For this I used Paint dot net and the amazing Codelab plugin which allowed me to write routines to measure the saturation of a color and use this to control transparency. This made the black landmasses transparent with soft edges. Next I turned the images to gray scale so they could be stored as 8 bit PNG images without dithering. The 72 images are animated at a rate of 10 frames per second but because the frames are crossfaded, you get the impression of a much higher frame rate.

Why did we do this? Because we can. Contact us if your organisation has geo-data that needs to be displayed in an appealing way.